Socratic Seminar

Socratic Seminar!          

Involving your students in a Socratic Seminar is one of the best ways to encourage a higher level of thinking and a deeper understanding of important texts and topics. Socratic Seminars also teach kids to establish how to discuss and build ideas off of one another. "This type of student-led discussion (based on Socrates’ method of student inquiry rather than teacher lecture) elicits student ownership, deep thinking, critical questioning,academic vocabulary usage, and a rooted sense of community. Although the teacher is seemingly offstage, a meaningful and effective Socratic seminar only occurs through intentional planning." -Edutopia

Teaching your students to conduct a Socratic Seminar is one of the most powerful teaching tools you can implement as a teacher!

"Socratic Seminar focuses on deep discussion around a central text, so it is important that complex, rich texts are chosen that invite multiple interpretations and negotiation to arrive at meaning." -AVID

For this Socratic Seminar the students are focusing on “positive change” and “taking action.” This was based on the 5th grade ELA Wonders Curriculum Unit 4, Week, 3 Essential Question “What can people do to bring about a positive change?” This was a big topic and we spent several weeks even after this one reading articles in addition to the Wonders curriculum texts that connected to this theme/idea. Texts/topics we covered included: Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Abbigail Addams, as well as some current event articles such as the Athletes taking a kneel, a boy with cancer who started a foundation, a girl in Florida who created an invention to help those in need, etc. It’s extremely heart-melting to hear the passion in the kids’ voices as they share and develop their own opinions about the world. Throughout the length of this unit you could see their little light bulbs going off as they read stories about people in our history who have made positive changes by standing up for what’s right, and also about the power that even children can have in making a positive change, such as raising money, building awareness, and developing inventions to help those in need. It was a really powerful topic and one that was time well spent! We do A LOT of collaborative discussions in here, and we've done TONS of small circle Socratic Seminars so they have had practice with this type of discussion, but this was our first whole group Inside/Outside Circle Socratic Seminar this year and they did an AWESOME JOB!!

Effectively conducting a Socratic Seminar unit will enhance your students’ learning across all areas. It will strengthen their reading comprehension skills, writing skills, higher level thinking skills, and their ability to communicate and develop ideas with their peers.

Here’s how to get started!:

1) You first want to introduce the topic, or question that students will be focusing on (I often times use the weekly Essential Question in our ELA Wonders curriculum as our discussion point). 2) You want to make sure you provide students with a variety of complex texts and resources to thoroughly gather information on the topic. If using the weekly Essential Question in Wonders, you already have 3 different texts built in. I then often times further enhance their knowledge on the topic by finding a couple of current event news articles that align with the topic in their reading curriculum. I use the Newsela.com site (This site is AMAZING if you don’t know about it, go there IMMEDIATELY! You can create a teacher/class account for free). This site creates current news articles for children. You can choose them by grade level, content, topic, and also Lexile level. It’s a great resource! The students need to read closely and interact with each text/resource provided. I generally have the students annotate the texts as we read/discuss them. I walk them through note-taking (either 2 or 3 column notes) on each text as we read, annotate, and discuss. This process ensures they are reading, understanding the text, and have notes with important details laid out in an organized manner. 3) After all sources have been read and discussed, the students need to prepare for the discussion. To do this I have students write Costa's Leveled Questions (Level 1, 2, and 3) for one or two texts of their choosing (I did not have them write questions for ALL texts/sources we have read as we read about 7 sources for this particular unit). These questions are meant to guide their discussion and facilitate a deeper level of thinking. 4) Last, you decide which method(setup) of Socratic Seminar you would like you use: One Large Circle, Inside/Outside Circle (or Fishbowl), Simultaneous Seminars (multiple small circles), or Triad Circle (“pilots” and “co-pilots). For the lesson you see above in my video, I chose to do the Inside/Outside "Fishbowl" Circle. The inside circle are the speakers- these students will engage in the discussion for the first round. In the outer circle the students are observing, listening, and writing down notes. Once done, the outside circle students give their feedback to the inside circle student they were focusing on, and then they switch places- the inner circle becomes the outer circle and visa versa. In order for a Socratic Seminar to flow successfully, it's important to assign a student “facilitator” who can help guide the discussion/group if they get off track. You can see this in my video above where this student guides the group by posing a new question, and calling out students who may not be participating. 5)After the seminar is over, the students then complete a constructed response writing prompt (which is generally the initial question posed as we started the unit and the Socratic seminar). I always have the focus question/writing prompt posted on the board so they can see it throughout their discussion- helps keep them on track. In doing all this, by the time the Socratic Seminar is finished, they have not only their own ideas, but now new ideas generated from their peers through the power of discussion, in addition to their notes and text evidence. For the this lesson, the constructed response prompt was developed into the format of a 5 paragraph essay via Google Docs- following the RACES format/process (just in essay form rather than a single paragraph).

Collaboratively Learning,

Megan Brown
megan.brown@omsd.net